Uarda : a Romance of Ancient Egypt — Volume 10 eBook

But nevertheless no one, not even the priests, the
guardians of souls, could be permitted to resist the
laws of which he was the bulwark, to which he himself
was subject, and which enjoined obedience to his authority;
and before be left Tanis he had given Ameni and his
followers to understand that he alone was master in
Egypt.

The God Seth, who had been honored by the Semite races
since the time of the Hyksos, and whom they called
upon under the name of Baal, had from the earliest
times never been allowed a temple on the Nile, as being
the God of the stranger; but Rameses—­in
spite of the bold remonstrances of the priestly party
who called themselves the ’true believers’—­raised
a magnificent temple to this God in the city of Tanis
to supply the religious needs of the immigrant foreigners.
In the same spirit of toleration he would not allow
the worship of strange Gods to be interfered with,
though on the other hand he was jealous in honoring
the Egyptian Gods with unexampled liberality.
He caused temples to be erected in most of the great
cities of the kingdom, he added to the temple of Ptah
at Memphis, and erected immense colossi in front of
its pylons in memory of his deliverance from the fire.

[One of these is still
in existence. It lies on the ground among
the ruins of ancient
Memphis.]

In the Necropolis of Thebes he had a splendid edifice
constructed-which to this day delights the beholder
by the symmetry of its proportions in memory of the
hour when he escaped death as by a miracle; on its
pylon he caused the battle of Kadesh to be represented
in beautiful pictures in relief, and there, as well
as on the architrave of the great banqueting—­
hall, he had the history inscribed of the danger he
had run when he stood “alone and no man with
him!”

By his order Pentaur rewrote the song he had sung
at Pelusium; it is preserved in three temples, and,
in fragments, on several papyrus-rolls which can be
made to complete each other. It was destined
to become the national epic—­the Iliad of
Egypt.

Pentaur was commissioned to transfer the school of
the House of Seti to the new votive temple, which
was called the House of Rameses, and arrange it on
a different plan, for the Pharaoh felt that it was
requisite to form a new order of priests, and to accustom
the ministers of the Gods to subordinate their own
designs to the laws of the country, and to the decrees
of their guardian and ruler, the king. Pentaur
was made the superior of the new college, and its
library, which was called “the hospital for
the soul,” was without an equal; in this academy,
which was the prototype of the later-formed museum
and library of Alexandria, sages and poets grew up
whose works endured for thousands of years—­and
fragments of their writings have even come down to
us. The most famous are the hymns of Anana,
Pentaur’s favorite disciple, and the tale of
the two Brothers, composed by Gagabu, the grandson
of the old Prophet.